How are salaries computed?

Aviva now has apprenticeship programmes. All one needs is A Levels to join it. The Actuarial Apprentice Programme has a starting salary of £18,000 while The Underwriting Apprentice Programme, £14,500. The reason for the difference in the salary is simple. One programme is tougher than the other and in UK, they recognize this starting at that low level.

Now let's move 7 time zones away to Malaysia. I have an MSc in Acturial Science. The Assistant Secretary in the office only has an SPM (O Levels equivalent). She gets paid RM2,000. I get paid RM3,000. I am not sure how my employer did the Maths to come up with this figure. She actually gets paid RM2,000 for spending about half a day everyday watching dramas on her iPhone and browsing the net. I get paid RM3,000 for contributing to the company.

And then Malaysian employers go on and on about how employees job hop. Why do you think? Common sense is probably not so common after all.

Image source

Insure yourself against laziness

Image source

You know how when you are going on a holiday by plane, you can insure your baggage. In case a mistake happens and your baggage gets lost, you can file for a claim?

The basic principle is you pay a premium and when you make a claim, if it is valid, you get paid for the loss.

So, check this out. I heard from someone who knows someone who spoke to someone (you get the picture. I am giving no names.) that there is a financial institution which has insured itself against miscalculations! This same financial institution also insures itself against losses made from bad loans. When claims were actually made for bad loans, the claims were not valid because the institution failed to make thorough checks prior to approving the loans.

By insuring itself against miscalculation (due to laziness) and lazy work (or bad loans as they call it. I call it lazy work. Approving without conducting checks.), does that not all give us lazy bums some hope? I feel like walking to an insurance company right now and insuring myself against any possible loss resulting from my laziness to put in effort at work.

I don't understand how an institution can make the effort to pay premiums for an insurance to cover miscalculations, but it can't put in effort to perform correct calculations. What has come to the world we live in today?!

Solving an issue by the way it presents itself is too mainstream.

Since I've started commuting to work by public transport, I've noticed how bad the system is here in Malaysia. I've wanted to write this for quite a while now, but arriving home late after standing for several hours a day in total, just waiting, I get too exhausted to write. I just slump into bed and wait for my bed time.

So, this is the problem with the trains in Malaysia. They never run on schedule, meaning, during peak hours, the crowd would have built up in every station and before the train arrives in KL Sentral, it is packed. Malaysia is not Scotland, so people push to get into the train. It took me about 2 days of being polite and missing trains on both days before I've learnt to push like my life depended on it. In all the pushing people do, clothes and bags belonging to a person will end up in different places. It is that bad.

I've made a simple Ishikawa diagram to illustrate the problem: 

We have trains breaking down which means they need to be changed to brand new, working trains. Next, punctuality seems like an issue of management. To me, it seems like training management and getting new train sets should solve the problem.

However, we've gone around solving the problem in a different light. Because of the crowd, which left no space for breathing, brought around certain indecent issues, we decided to separate the crowds into male and female coaches. Indecent issue - solved. Crowd issue - still there.

We got new 6 coach trains with a capacity of 1000 people (it was 3 coach trains before with a capacity of 400 people). It was supposed to solve the problem of people waiting for long duration for train. But trains are still late. When a train is supposed to arrive at 6.36pm, it never arrives at 6.36pm. I will be okay if it arrives at 6.37pm, but it doesn't either. Yesterday, it arrived after 7pm. Punctuality - not solved. Crowd issue - still there.

If only we got working trains and made management more efficient, it would have been like this: punctuality - solved, crowd - no more, people - happy.

But no, we can't do that because solving an issue by the way it presents itself is too mainstream.